“For Hölderlin, the harmony of the natural and historical world is not something given, but something that one has to be trained to perceive amidst the facticity of suffering and violence. The deliberate confusion of Hölderlin’s poetry, triggered by complex syntactical structures and a dense semantic texture, challenges the human mind to find evidence of the divine in its own mental and poetic self-organization. Disjunction and chaos eventually triumph over organization, leading to a form of aesthetic exercise that undermines rather than bolsters a conception of nature and history as self-organizing, harmonious systems.”

I made up my mind to dig into papers on the chronicles of the Oromos and related, which are at least available at the moment on the internet.

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As much as “The Question of Eritrea” was a significant theme of the political discourse of the last generation, with the outcome we are well acquainted with today, “The Oromo Question” may as well play a major role in the political deliberations of the present Ethiopian generation. Whether some of us would like to consider “nationalism” in its narrow regional perspective ( not to use the concept called “narrow” nationalism) to be anachronistic in the coming 21st century, vis a vis being a significant regional global player (or at the least to escape being a playing ball of bigger political entities), one has nonetheless to be fully aware of the “Oromo politcal discourse” to assume a pragmatic political activity with all the backdrops of the concrete Ethiopian political reality and its constituencies!

Find a few of the collections I happened to access in the folllowing link:-

The Myth of Human Progress and the Collapse of Complex Societies

By Chris Hedges

” ……….. The human species, led by white Europeans and Euro-Americans, has been on a 500-year-long planetwide rampage of conquering, plundering, looting, exploiting and polluting the earth—as well as killing the indigenous communities that stood in the way. But
the game is up. The technical and scientific forces that created a life of unparalleled luxury—as well as unrivaled military and economic power for a small, global elite—are the forces that now doom us. The mania for ceaseless economic expansion and exploitation has become a curse, a death sentence. But even as our economic and environmental systems unravel, after the hottest year [2012] in the contiguous 48 states since record keeping began 107 years ago, we lack the emotional and intellectual creativity to shut down the engine of global capitalism. We have bound ourselves to a doomsday machine that grinds forward.”

—““When the amygdala is active with blood and oxygen, there is less activation in the prefrontal cortex. Our thinking power is disrupted and there are deficits in our problem solving, because the blood and oxygen are in the amygdala versus the prefrontal cortex. It is like losing 10 to 15 IQ points temporarily, which explains “what was I thinking?” So we are thinking but with less capacity and brain power.”

Are their Amygdalas permanently “hijacked” ? The Ethiopian active politicians of all colors!

Yes they are, since they are all dancing with their “old” memories – The ideological legacy of the last generation!

In such cases of psychosis experts in the fields of Neuroscience and Psychiatry talk of deficiencies in Emotional Intelligence (EQ)/a significant counterpart of IQ; with arguments going as far as presuming that EQ makes an 80% contribution whereas IQ makes only a 20% contribution in respect to being successful in life performance. (See on emotional intelligence and philosophy:- Emotional Intelligence).

In political philosophy I would relate this /Amygdala Hijack/ to what Hanna Arendt long ago called ” Gedankenlosigkeit”/ Mindlessness, describing totalitarianism of all kinds!

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The following sort of “emotional audit” mentioned in the papers may indeed be helpful to go about with such handicaps at an individual small scale level!

Intelligence and the Brain: Recent Advances in Understanding How the Brain Works with Jeff Hawkins

According to Hawkins, intelligence emerges in the cerebral cortex, a sheet folded into six layers that consists of many regions. A hierarchical cortical structure guides the functional principles of each region in the cortex. What then is the fundamental magic of the brain? Dynamic predictions based on incoming information. These predictions start in the lower layers of hierarchy and are sent to the upper layers of each region. When predictions are correct, the situation is correctly understood. Incorrect predictions require additional global interpretation and prediction at higher layers. Prediction results from higher levels are sent back to lower layers to help the understanding of incoming information. This system is memory-based: the associative memory of recurrent connections enables new predictions based on past information. In short, Hawkins says that emerging intelligence in the brain is based on the ability to make predictions based on associative memory with invariant representations.

When is the Ethiopian political class going to get rid of its dogmatic wreath?

A glance at the political discussion all through the active political organized players and stakeholders would suffice to find out that this is not the case. With this in mind to give social harmony a chance I have presented a model of harmony, which I was promoting during the last decade so that a touch of serenity and sovereignty would come to the latter. Say good bye to the bewildered spirit of the youth of the last generation and its dogmatic wreath to welcome the new youth with the new spirit of enlightenment and cultural development. Make 2015 the year of the enlightened youth for a bright future of peace and social harmony, free of the dogmatic past, making your choice as a sovereign individual to determine your own destiny.

I would like to invite the contemporary youth, on this trip and look into the harmony model. – Not only the latter but also the last and lost generation of the past too, who are still messing up the present Ethiopian landscape with their political legacy and the dogmatic wreath of their past, whatever color it manifests.